Research Reveals Detrimental Effects of Liberal Social Engineering on Families

In my book, Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal – America’s Racial Obsession, I detailed the economic and cultural social engineering used by the political left to compromise (read “destroy”) the black family in America. I also said that populations of black Americans, particularly in urban areas, had been a test case for social programs and other devices implemented by progressive politicians. In other words, those social programs and policies deemed to be successful were to be (and are now being) applied to the general population. In that population, feminism – to name just one example – has been integral in subverting gender roles and fostering confusion with regard to the individual responsibilities of mothers and fathers.

Given the ambivalence and occasionally grotesque modeling that springs from this, the stage is set for the cycle to continue as the morally rudderless children who come out of these families create families of their own.

Despite the abject denials of leftist “experts” that families are outmoded, or claims that single parent households are just as viable as two-parent ones (feminist icon Gloria Steinem repeatedly insisted that mothers and fathers are interchangeable), we can clearly see from the resulting dysfunction that has arisen in families since the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s that this was merely rhetorically-convenient, self-serving propaganda.

Now, Isabel Sawhill, a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution who focuses on social policy and the well-being of children and families, has published an article on new research which gives the lie to these progressive sensibilities.

“We have known for some time that children who grow up in single parent-families do not fare as well as those with two parents – especially two biological parents,” Sawhill says. “In recent years, some scholars have argued that the consequences are especially serious for boys. Not only do boys need fathers, presumably to learn how to become men and how to control their often unruly temperaments, but less obviously, and almost counterintuitively, it turns out that boys are more sensitive or less resilient than girls. Parenting seems to affect the development of boys more than it affects the development of girls. Specifically, their home environment is more likely to affect behavior and performance in school.”

Citing new research from Harvard professor Raj Chetty and a team of colleagues, Sawhill discusses the detrimental effects of single parenthood on boys and girls regardless of family income, “but especially for boys living in high-poverty, largely minority neighborhoods.” Boys from low-income, single-parent families are less likely to work, Sawhill says, and less likely to go to college or earn a decent income.

No kidding…

“These effects are largest when the families live in metropolitan areas (commuting zones) with a high fraction of black residents, high levels of racial and income segregation, and lots of single-parent families. In short, it is not just the boy’s own family situation that matters but also the kind of neighborhood he grows up in. Exposure to high rates of crime, and other potentially toxic peer influences without the constraining influence of adult males within these families, seems to set these boys on a very different course than other boys and, perhaps more surprisingly, on a different course from their sisters.”

– Isabel Sawhill, Brookings Institution

“Repairing families,” as Sawhill puts it, “is difficult at best.” Like many such observers, she suggests things like “providing more education and a different future for these young women may actually be just as important as helping their brothers if we don’t want to perpetuate the father absence that caused these problems in the first place.”

And how are we to do this? It occurs to me that, as I indicated in Negrophilia, efforts directed at these symptoms are meaningless. Attempts to educate or re-educate young men and women as to the familial responsibilities with which everyone was familiar fifty years ago are utterly ineffective and self-defeating when government social and economic policy, media, the press, and education remain marshaled against the traditional family to the benefit of the socialist agenda.

Erik Rush is a New York-born columnist, author and speaker who writes sociopolitical commentary for WorldNetDaily and other publications. He is also the founder and Chief Editor of Instigator News Network. In February of 2007, Erik was the first to break the story of Barack Obama's ties to militant Chicago preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright on a national level. His book, Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal ~ America's Racial Obsession, has been called "the definitive book on race politics in America."